Assistant Professor, School of Justice Studies, Eastern Kentucky University

Presentation Details: February 13, 2014, 4:00-5:30 pm, Faculty House

Judah Schept is an Assistant Professor of Justice Studies at Eastern Kentucky University.
He holds a Ph.D. in Criminal Justice from Indiana University and a BA in Sociology
from Vassar College. Judah's book, tentatively titled Left and Locking Up: Capital Departures, (Neo) Liberal Politics, and Carceral Expansion, is forthcoming in 2015 from New York University Press. Judah has published and forthcoming
articles in journals such as Radical Criminology, Theoretical Criminology, Social Justice, and the Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture. In addition, Judah has published numerous pieces of public scholarship on issues
of prison expansion, alternatives to incarceration, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
for the Reclaiming Justice Network, based out of the Centre for Crime and Justice
Studies in the United Kingdom, and for the newly formed critical social justice collective
Uprooting Criminology.

Judah is a scholar-activist whose community organizing informs his research and teaching.
Judah practices a critical interdisciplinary scholarship drawing from diverse academic
literatures including American studies, critical and cultural criminology, cultural
anthropology, cultural and political geography, the sociology of punishment, and postcolonial
studies. Judah is particularly interested in the political economies, geographical
histories, and cultural politics of various sites of the prison industrial complex.
He currently has two major research projects. One, on which his book is based, examines
the discourse and politics of jail growth and resistance to it in a small and progressive
Midwestern city. The second is an ongoing examination of carceral expansion in eastern
Kentucky, focusing especially on the spatial, political-economic and cultural continuities
between coal and prison. At EKU, Judah teaches undergraduate courses in Law and Society
and Criminological Theory and a graduate course in Qualitative Methods. Judah co-coordinated
the development of a new Social Justice Studies major and is also the new coordinator
for the undergraduate internship program.

Find out more about Dr. Schept by visiting at the Eastern Kentucky University website.